Author: vboboe
Date: 2008-09-01 22:21
mschmidt
<<Well, I think about reeds a little differently...but I don't think anyone understands reeds well enough to be certain about these sorts of hypotheses>>
i 'heartily' agree with you here that there's a great deal of incomprehension out there about reeds, and i think it's a very important task that we do, trying to bring as much as possible out of the twilight zone into conscious realisation through a combination of hypothesizing, cutting experiences in real life, other people's conscious understanding and the various ways they visualise things, and what actually works in real-life playable reeds
<<Blending the tip with the heart means that it is harder to define where the tip ends>>
The light test helps me define tip from blend by comparing light & shadow
and for this each person's ability to visualize (or learn how to visualize) 'grey scale' will determine what one sees (or can't see) -- this is an individual, and subjective, judgement call, one could use that handy blade measuring gadget to objectively measure relative thickness / thinness instead, but then, does the gadget measure cane density, and is the presumption of one-size-must-fit-all in the reed-maker's mind willing to make adjustments for differences in cane when measuring with the gadget (sorry, its proper name escapes me at the moment)
When a wet reed is held up to bright light, one could mentally decide there are four main types of light and shade visible
semi-transparent wood - example, extreme tip edges
translucent wood - example, the thinner blend nearer the tip
semi-opaque wood - example, the thicker blend nearer the heart
opaque wood - example, the spine and rails
Each of these 4 categories could be further sub-divided into bright, light, shaded and dark respectively in order to describe relative woodiness in critical areas of the reed
Eyeballing it on grey scale, if shaded semi-opaque wood is found in the lower corners of the tip near the sides, it's considered too woody and must be eased off until this part of the tip is moderately translucent -- so i'd say the tip is defined by thin wood that is mostly translucent rather than semi-opaque
And again, if any of the blend area is thin enough to be bright or light semi-transparent, that's far too much wood off already, it should appear as dark translucent to bright semi-opaque in the blend
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